Philip V. McHarris - Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies, University of Rochester

The Black Studies Podcast

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Philip McHarris, who teaches in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at University of Rochester. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing essays, he is the author of Beyond Policing (2024) and is completing a book manuscript titled Brick Dreams, to be published by Princeton University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the urgency of the study of policing and mass incarceration for Black Studies, the politics of thinking expansively about Black study, and the transformative work that comes from teaching and imagining from a space of Black liberation struggle.